Three of Nadine Gordimer's novels were banned by the South African government during apartheid.

Photo: Guillermo Arias, Associated Press

Three of Nadine Gordimer's novels were banned by the South African...

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(FILES) This file photo taken on August 28, 1990 shows South African author and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer posing during the Elie Wiesel Foundation Conference in Oslo on "The Anatomy of Hate". Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, died at the age of 90 at her home in Johannesburg on July 13, 2014, her family said. AFP PHOTO / POOL / MORTEN HVAALMorten Hvaal/AFP/Getty Images

Nadine Gordimer was first a writer of fiction and a defender of creativity and expression. But as a white South African who hated apartheid's dehumanization of blacks, she was also a determined political activist in the struggle to end white minority rule in her country.

Ms. Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991 for novels that explored the complex relationships and human cost of racial conflict in apartheid-era South Africa, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on Sunday. She was 90 years old. Her son Hugo and daughter Oriane were with her at the time, Ms. Gordimer's family said in a statement Monday.

The author wrote 15 novels as well as several volumes of short stories, nonfiction and other works, and was published in 40 languages around the world, according to the family.

"She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realize its new democracy," the family said. Her "proudest days" included winning the Nobel Prize and testifying in the 1980s on behalf of a group of antiapartheid activists accused of treason, they said.

Per Wastberg, an author and member of the Nobel Prize-awarding Swedish Academy, said Ms. Gordimer's descriptions of the different faces of racism told the world about South Africa during apartheid.

"She portrayed humans of all kinds," said Wastberg, a close friend. "Many South African authors and artists went into exile, but she felt she had to be a witness to what was going on and also lend her voice to the black, silenced authors."

Ms. Gordimer struggled with arthritis and rheumatism but seemed to be in good spirits when they last spoke three weeks ago, he said.

'Literary giant'

"Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life's work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity," South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, said in a statement.

During apartheid, Ms. Gordimer praised Nelson Mandela, the prisoner who later became president, and accepted the decision of the main antiapartheid movement to use violence against South Africa's white-led government.

"Having lived here for 65 years," she said, "I am well aware for how long black people refrained from violence. We white people are responsible for it."

Ms. Gordimer grew up in Springs town, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Britain and Lithuania. She began writing at age 9, and kept writing well into her 80s.

She said her first "adult story," published in a literary magazine when she was 15, grew out of her reaction as a young child to watching the casual humiliation of blacks. She recalled blacks being barred from touching clothes before buying in shops in her hometown, and police searching the maid's quarters at the Gordimer home for alcohol, which blacks were not allowed to possess.

"Telling Times," a 2010 collection of her nonfiction writing dating to 1950, offers some glimpses of her own experience. She wrote in a 1963 essay of a meeting with a poet giving her an idea of a life beyond her small hometown and her then aimless existence.

Ms. Gordimer's first novel, "The Lying Days," appeared in 1953, and she acknowledged it had autobiographical elements. A New York Times reviewer compared it to Alan Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country," calling Ms. Gordimer's work "the longer, the richer, intellectually the more exciting."

1974 Booker Prize

She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for "The Conservationist," a novel about a white South African who loses everything.

Among Ms. Gordimer's best-known novels is "Burger's Daughter," which appeared in 1979, three years after the Soweto student uprising brought the brutality of apartheid to the world's attention.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Ms. Gordimer said that as a young artist, she agonized that she was cut off from "the world of ideas" by the isolation of apartheid. But she came to understand "that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place."